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My Beginning

Timeline - 1971

My career beginning has already been told in my first book "An Ordinary Guy, An Unknown Spy", but some background is needed here for those that haven't read it.

I started work with MI6 in 1971 at the age of 16. I had not passed through any university system. I was asked if I'd like to consider working for my government the day I quit school by my headmaster Mr Morrill at Rickmansworth Grammar. I believe he was associated with someone within MI6, an educated guess would be Sir John Rennie, the head of MI6 in 1971. Rennie was tasked with changing the service. I also believe he was against such changes and I was his experiment to prove the system was better as it was.

In the beginning, I felt like a fish out of water, I believe I am still the only person to ever join the service as an Officer with little education. I guessed I was "to lower the tone of the place" after it became a bit of an 'old boys' network. After the Cambridge five debacle, none of the traitors were ever prosecuted and that proved in a way that there was a degree of protectionism. The USA began to lose confidence in the UK's security within the Intelligence community.

Everything I know I have learnt from the service, an advantage and disadvantage. I never enjoyed a network of contacts that those that went through university created. Nor had I come from a family with contacts in influential places.

I wanted to find my own position, I think I managed very well, and I taught them a thing or two in my time.

Picture 1. Century House, then Headquarters of the British Intelligence Service, MI6.

I went through 'Spy School' and qualified adequately as an Officer, then left to my own devices 'to see what I could do'. On my initiative, without any instructions, I began raiding any company I thought useful by copying the hard drive inside photocopy machines in offices all over the country. I used a device built by a friend who was working at an electronics company in Watford. I had realised in those days photocopy machines had a fault, in that every photocopy was stored and not deleted on a storage drive inside the machine. I posed as a service engineer, paperwork and credentials supplied by my first agent recruit Janice, who worked at Xerox in Uxbridge. The information gleaned by downloading that stored 'picture' from copies of copies was transferred to a database created by Karen my secretary, who was kept busy transferring hundreds of thousands of bits of information that I was stealing. Imagine the amount of information one can glean from letters and documents from banks and international businesses. Names, addresses, who is doing what, who is selling what to who, it was all good stuff after the chaff was filtered out by Karen. She was a very busy lady indeed. We became an amazing source of information for MI6 colleagues, who had no idea where or how I was obtaining this useful stuff for them. The sort of stuff needed in MI6 to make contacts, bribe, recruit agents, blackmail and all the dirt one needed to do the job. Or at least that's how I saw it.

When I began work I'd never been abroad, so I was given a simple task in Rabat, Morocco in King Hassan II's palace. Simple but useful, because I also liaised with a CIA agent which created a link for me with the American Secret Service too. That was my initiation into the world overseas and I am indebted to Maurice Oldfield who was "C" from 1973 to 1978, when I qualified and started working at Century House, London, MI6 headquarters at the time. His gentle treatment was appreciated when I was a 'newbie' and for his confidence in my abilities while I was completely green when it came to working abroad.

So, initially feeling like a complete outsider, with the barest of education, no qualifications, probably the youngest ever recruit, green as green gets, I was always going to be different. I liked that. I didn't want to be the same as those toff types from Oxbridge anyhow. I did make my mark and I had a sense of satisfaction that these people were coming to me and asking if I had anything on certain people or companies, and often Karen would find something in her database. She had created a separate system from the service network, as I always felt that it was illegally gained information we should have the capability of quickly disposing of the entire lot, should the need arise. I needn't have worried, it turns out most information the Intelligence Service holds is obtained in that way.

The work became more and more challenging as I gained experience, then, in 1988 I was given a task in Angola. Things didn't go according to plan and following capture, torture and escape, my career ended. What followed was years of keeping my secret, suffering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Until 2019, when I wrote and published my first book.

This story, begins in 1976, let's start there.